For decades, the data processing industries have been devoting great resources to making computer supported user interactive display technology systems and methods to provide interactive users with an interface environment that is easy to use. This has been a major task since the great expansion of computer users over the past decade has expanded computer use to less and less skilled and sophisticated users. This effort has been further driven by the rise of the Internet or Web. The latter two terms are meant to be interchangeable and are used as such throughout this application. In effect, there has been a technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the Internet over the past five years. As a result of these changes, it seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world requires human-computer interfaces. There is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the industrial world's population; which, up to a few years ago was computer-illiterate or, at best, computer indifferent. The population will, to a large part, have to become involved with computer interfaces and computer interfaces must, thus, continue to be simplified and made more user friendly.
This problem of simplification is particularly pronounced in the Web or Internet. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which has been the documentation language of the Internet or Web for years, offers direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources that were, at first, text and then images, and now include media, i.e. “hypermedia”, that involves audio, video and all types of visual files. It is now possible for the Web user to literally spend hours going through Web pages or document after document in search of subject matter of interest to the user. It is frequently the case that after the user has gone through page upon page of Web documents, he wishes to go back to certain pages of interest.
These pages are identified by their addresses on the Web, i.e. URLs. As source databases on the Web have become more numerous and extensive, the URLs have become much more lengthy and complex. Such increased length and complexity of URLs have been intensified by the present use of automated Web search engines to locate user sought documents. These search engines operate dynamically and automatically on the Web, and use robot crawlers, also referred to as spiders or harvesters that interface with the user's Web browsers through requests and responses to locate Web pages in the Web database sources. As the robots crawl through such combined databases to locate the sought Web documents, they dynamically generate the URLs of the accessed Web documents. These URLs conventionally consist of a lead portion defining the domain of the Web database source followed by a description of the path that the robot followed through the hierarchy of the source database to reach the document location. These automatically generated URLs have highly complex and lengthy path portions, often full of question marks and other command punctuation, such as “&, %, $ and +”.
Thus the user and, particularly, the limited or computer novice user is faced with a difficult and tedious burden in attempting to retrieve Web documents of interest by entering the URLs of such documents. Of course bookmarking, which enables the user to have his Web browser save the lengthy and complex URLs for subsequent Web document retrieval, has been an enormous aid to users in such retrieval. However, there remains a great many circumstances wherein the user must enter a complex and lengthy URL. There is still a great need in Web document accessing to relieve users of this burden. Large database sources or domains maintained, i.e. owned, or hosted by large business, educational or governmental entities do employ internal techniques to make URLs of their Web documents simpler and more user-friendly. This may involve generating static Web pages from the dynamic data and storing the pages in the database of the source. Search robots or users visiting the source database, e.g. Web site, may then use conventional simple URLs. Alternatively, there are techniques available for rewriting the URL to simplify it by modifying the path portion of the URL but always within the database source, i.e. the domain portion of the URL does not change.